A couple weekends ago, my husband and I went for a drive to parts of the county we had not been to in years. As usual, I scanned the landscape for beautiful vistas and wildflowers. That morning, we saw scarlet-red cardinal flowers, buttery-yellow evening primrose, white Queen Anne’s lace, an intensely purple blossom of a wild raspberry – all fairly common roadside flowers that I can easily identify, even from a distance.

When I saw a yellow-orange flower, somewhat set back from the road, I could not match it with any wildflower that I knew. It took a while for my brain to wrestle with this puzzling image before I asked my husband to stop the car. He backed up and I grabbed my camera. While he waited in the car, I climbed up a small hill and gingerly found my way through some thorny brambles all the while chastising myself for not wearing long pants and my solid walking shoes. I made a note to check my body for deer ticks when we got home.

When I reached the plant, I still did not know what it was but I suspected that it might be an orchid. And there was a small stand of them! Unfortunately, I had the wrong lens on my camera, so the image is not quite as sharp as I would like it to be. But I was not going to return to the car and then climb back up with a different lens…

And up close:

yellow fringed orchid

The flowers I found are yellow fringed orchids (Platanthera ciliaris Lindley), and they are fairly common in the Southern Appalachian Mountains and even in the county South of us. However, this orchid has never been reported in my county before, further North and at higher elevations. It was a thrill to discover this beautiful wildflower in its habitat and to add another native orchid to the already diverse list of flora in our area.

41 Responses to A Rare Find

Hi Annette, I am glad that you got the tick. This is truly a beautiful kind of orchid and you captured it beautifully. My neighbor has lots of them in her front yard and I get to clip them, put them in a glass of water and let them grow roots and put them in a pot with soil. They are easy to grow and love to blossom every season again and again, don’t need much water. Enjoy

I’m mostly unfamliar with native orchids. Until a year ago, I didn’t know that we had some here in Texas. The ones sold in the grocery stores for Mother’s Day are lovely, but I’d take this find over those. It’s a beautiful plant. Not only that, BONAP shows it as native, and present here, only two counties away. Thanks to you, I might be able to identify it if I see some.

If you learn about their native habitat (e.g. forests or meadows or forest edge) and when they are in bloom, you have something to start with. It is amazing how many native orchids we have, certainly different and often less flashy than the tropical orchids we know from the store, but still intriguing and magical in their own ways.

It is amazing to me how any of the rare plants continue to re-produce themselves despite enroachment. But there are still so many untouched and un-visited areas in these mountains, I often wonder what’s out there that we don’t know about….

I plan to reblog your post in my blog https://hellocreativestimes.com. Since you have enabled reblogging on your post, I am assuming that you are allowing others to reblog this post. However, if you have any objection to reblogging your post, please let us know as soon as possible. Thank you.

I Love/Hate the article about the trash left in the forest/woods. It was not because I thought that U shouldn’t, BUT… more like U SHOULDN’T have been given the chance to HAVE TO write about it!!!
Some of my ‘fellowmen’ make me deeply upset/concerned about what… if anything. .. what are they THINKING about when they just dropped the trash on the ground in the 1st place, but even more so, when they walked away from the mess… !!! In their defense, please allow me to speculate that… MAYBE THEY CAME BACK FROM THEIR HIKE, FOUND THE TRASH THERE (left by someone else) … and they CLEANED it ALL up!!! Whew… I feel better already… on their behalf!!!

Hi Vicki – you are probably referring to my “Open Letter” post – yes, that was such blow to my sense of aesthetics. I don’t know what people think when they throw their trash out into nature. They probably don’t think, that’s the problem 😦